Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday December 13, 2012 @06:49PM
from the new-places-to-advertise dept.

New submitter stonetony writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "A team of 12 scientists and engineers has begun work at remote Lake Ellsworth. They are using a high-pressure hose and sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through more than two miles of ice. The aim is to analyse ice waters isolated for up to 500,000 years. The team of 12 scientists and engineers is using sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through the ice to waters isolated for up to half a million years. The process of opening a bore-hole is expected to last five days and will be followed by a rapid sampling operation before the ice refreezes."

"Ode to a Small Lump of Greenish Water that Turned to into Putty I Found in my Antarctic Pit That I Reached Using Slightly Sub-Gaseous Phase Water One Midsummer Morning, Which Turned Out to be Cthulhu's Placenta, There in His R'lyeh Prison, Turning What was Going to be my Nobel Prize Science Project into a Sudden Descent into Eldricht Helllllllllllaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahah
theMayansDidIttheMayansDidIttheMayansDidIttheMayansDidIt!!!!!!!! "

Agree, I would have hoped they would have used "sterilised water at near boiling point to blast a passage through" one more time. Maybe even spelling it sterilized that last time just to see if people are on their toes.

Fuck! You beat me to it. Take heed and bear witness to the plague these men shall unleash upon humanity!!!! Then the draconoids of niburu shall plunder our resources an rape those still alive! Or just some really fucking cool discoveries. Categorically unique fucking cool discoveries...my pants are getting tight.

This story brings the concept of dupe to a whole new level!For your convenience, a copy of the story is injected inside the story, so you don't have to remember where you've already read it and neither have to click on another link (a real boon for the lazy).

The summary wasn't clear so my questions are: Is the water sterilized? How hot is the water in the hose? How long has the lake water been isolated?
Also, Is the water sterilized? How hot is the water in the hose? How long has the lake water been isolated?

i live near a bunch of power stations, which use highly sterilized and purified water to turn to superheated steam to drive the turbines, except that if you drank such water it would strip all the nutrients out of your body and kill you.... purified and sterilized water isn't always as good as it seems (it may well kill any microorganisms the scientists are trying to discover and study)

if you drank such water it would strip all the nutrients out of your body and kill you

Do you have a credible link to that obvious bullshit [wikipedia.org] statement? I've seen it before, but it makes absolutely no sense at all. [thenakedscientists.com]

They're using sterilized water so as not to pollute the lake itself with organisms or minerals.

My old man always told me "don't believe nothin' you hear and only half of what you see." You should follow that advice; whoever told you distilled water would strip the nutrients out of your body and kill

funny the person who told me that purified (i never mentioned distilled) water can kill you works in a power station chem lab... i guess you must be the usual armchair expert though... so if you never seen a power station you wouldn't beleive they exist either? what about electrons? bet you never seen those.... pffft what a fuckass

They're using sterilized water so as not to pollute the lake itself with organisms or minerals.

You don't seem to know much about how a power station works (not surprising by the rest of your rant).

There are two types of water used in a power station; for cooling and for steam, and the two are physically isolated.
Cooling water comes from lakes or rivers, is used in heat exchangers to turn low pressure steam (isolated in pipes) back into water.
Most of the water used for steam is recirculated, so it doesn't end up in any lakes anyway.
The plumes of steam that you see coming out of cooling tower

Yes, if the lake is actually filled with millions of giant underwater ice spiders, and 0.1% of them have a genetic variation that makes them resistant to sterilized boiling water, then that 0.1% can survive the trip to the surface. Thus creating a dual resistance super bug(literally, or you might technically say spiders are not bug, meh).

Well, technically the russians haven't quite breached the lake. It's ongoing right now and here's what I've followed so far:
The layer of ice just above the lake is refrozen water (and not compressed snow from above). They already analyzed that without finding anything significant (a US lab found lots of stuff but the word is that it's all contaminated DNA, a french lab found only one candidate piece of DNA, that ice is 10 times cleaner than the cleanest water we can make in a lab).
So a few days ago the russians breached the last remaining ice after using a sterilized drill. They then withdrew the drill and immediately lowered the pressure of the drilling fluid, allowing the water of the lake to raise into the hole for 600 meters. This water froze quickly. Now they are drilling again this freshly frozen ice which will be analyzed in a special very clean lab. I just don't know how they can drill again 600m of ice without deviating more than 10cm (the diameter of the core).
Official results should start coming in about a month.

Yes, because you can't do what you just said. Water has the (un)fortunate effect of reacting with almost anything it gets in contact with: CO2, metals, viruses suspended in air, deposits on glass surface even after they've been cleaned with acid and liquid O2, etc... and absorbing it. The water in the lake is purer because the only thing it comes in contact with is pure ice (and there's probably some segregation process going on inside). Anyway I was at a conference with the guys who are trying to analyze t

As long as the Arctic Expedition commander isn't an ancestor of Adelaide Brooke, we should be fine. If that turns out to be the case, better hope the TARDIS shows up.
Either way, just to be safe, nobody drinks the water or runs irrigation with it. K?

its antarctica... the land of 12 people rocking up and thinking they're going to make a big hole and do something awesome and eventually not doing much except trying to survive the most hostile environment on earth until a boat comes and takes them home or they die